Funny Boys

Success and the city.

When Josh Abramson, Ricky Van Veen, Jakob Lodwick, and Zach Klein decided in the spring of last year that they wanted to live in New York City, their preparation consisted largely of what they called “Sex and the City” nights. They would rent DVDs of the HBO series and watch for hours at a time, while drinking gin-and-tonics and imagining what delights the city held in store.

Their purpose in watching the programs was not really to learn about the habits of women they were likely to encounter in Manhattan; Josh, Ricky, and Jakob are twenty-three, and Zach is a year younger. Most of the girls they knew who’d moved to New York were not so much juggling lovers or purchasing fabulous designer clothes as struggling to get a job, or find an apartment. Instead, the four friends found themselves identifying with the four television characters. Josh, Ricky, and Jakob had been living together for a year in San Diego (while Zach was completing his senior year), and they had discovered that, although the California sun and beach were pleasant enough, San Diego was the kind of place where, as Josh liked to put it, if you were motivated you bartended four nights a week.

The friends finally arrived in New York last summer, and took up residence in a newly renovated, forty-two-hundred-square-foot, five-bedroom loft in Tribeca, which rents for ten thousand dollars a month—a move that bears about as much relation to the typical postcollegiate experience as “Sex and the City” does to the demographic it purports to represent. The friends have avoided the hardships endured by some of their peers, such as being obliged to live in the outer boroughs, owing to the business they run out of their fifth bedroom, a Web site called CollegeHumor.com. The site features articles written by students or recent graduates on subjects such as “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned in First Semester” and “The Guide to a Great IM Profile,” but the mainstay of its content is visual: digital photographs and video snippets of dorm-room fun submitted by the online readership, and updated daily. It is visited by nearly eight million unique users a month.

CollegeHumor.com was started in 1999 by Josh and Ricky, who grew up in a suburb of Baltimore called Timonium and have been friends since sixth grade. The site began as a place to collect all the jokes, links, and silly photographs that college students like to e-mail around, and served as a kind of nerdy diversion for Josh, who went to the University of Richmond, and Ricky, who was at Wake Forest. Eventually, they recruited Jakob, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology (whom Ricky and Josh met online, although he also grew up in Timonium), to help manage the site; Zach, a college friend of Ricky’s from Wake Forest, joined later.

The site came to dominate the waking hours of all four collaborators, whose formal educations were neglected. In certain instances, this was probably not a bad thing: the textbook used for one class in e-commerce that Josh took toward his degree, in finance, had been rendered obsolete by the dot-com crash of 2000; according to its calculations CollegeHumor.com should have been bringing in fifteen million dollars a month.

The numbers were nowhere near that good, but they were good enough for the friends to decide that they could attempt to make the site their full-time job. In the year and a half since Josh, Ricky, and Jakob left college, traffic to the site has grown three hundred per cent. In December of 2003, CollegeHumor.com generated $45,400; in December of this year, the revenues were $405,000, nearly half of that coming from sales of faux-vintage T-shirts with slogans— “What Would Ashton Do?”; “I Gave My Word to Stop at Third: 1987 Teen Abstinence Day Suffolk County Public Schools”—which they started marketing last spring under the brand name Busted Tees.

Hence the apartment, which is decorated, in only semi-ironic fashion, according to the CollegeHumor guys’ idea of urban sophistication, with a mixture of purchases from stores in SoHo and from Bloomingdale’s. These include a leather couch; a dining table perpetually set with a runner, placemats, and napkins in napkin rings, in readiness for grand dinner parties of which they have so far had one; a piano on which Josh, who supplemented his income in high school with piano-bar appearances, is able to play the entire Beatles catalogue; and a cabinet filled with crystal wineglasses donated by Josh’s mother. In perhaps the best measure of post-adolescent male luxury, there is a cumulative total of a hundred and fifty-three inches of flat-screen television scattered around the dwelling.

Although the quartet has not avoided some real-estate pitfalls that savvier New Yorkers might have been able to anticipate—the empty lot outside the loft’s windows was transformed, within weeks of their move, into a construction site, the future location of a twenty-one-story apartment building—their home serves not just as a workplace and a shelter but also as an expression of how they would like to be perceived. Readers of CollegeHumor.com might suspect, or hope, that its creators live in a den of beer bongs, pinball machines, and unwashed dishes. This is just what the College Humor boys, who have recently discovered the joy of port, wanted to avoid. “Josh was at this advertising convention, and they were giving out drinks, and the waiter looked at him and said, ‘I can get you an orange juice,’ ” Ricky said one recent afternoon, while lounging in the apartment and explaining the drawbacks of youthful success. “It’s hard being taken seriously when you are our age. But, here, people can walk in and say, Obviously, these guys are doing something right.”

What does college humor consist of, judging from the contents of CollegeHumor.com? Girls without their tops on are one very popular source of college humor, as are girls kissing each other. Vehicular mishaps also count as college humor; in one, a crane being used to fish a car out of the water topples over and itself falls in. Cute animals, such as a sleeping kitten propped between the pipes of a radiator, are funny, and so are highway signs, like one outside a McDonald’s that reads “Our salads are the shizzle dizzle.” But what is really funny is beer. “People love to send in photographs of their refrigerators filled with beer,” Josh said. Also popular are photographs of beer-can mobiles hanging from dorm-room ceilings, and of beer cans incongruously placed around the foot of a potted plant, which is, in turn, incongruously placed in a men’s communal bathroom, and so on.

In addition to receiving random submissions, the guys of CollegeHumor have recently seen the advantages of generating their own content—or branding content in the public domain as their own. In October, the site made available, thanks to TiVo, a video clip of Ashlee Simpson’s “Saturday Night Live” meltdown—she hurried offstage after her band and her lip-synch track didn’t mesh—only minutes after the event had actually occurred. That clip garnered close to a million hits in two days. The site has similarly been a popular destination for those who didn’t see Ron Artest’s assault on an N.B.A. spectator sufficient times in replay, and who want to witness it over and over again in Windows Media. Clips like these have earned CollegeHumor.com its first links from such heavily read sites as the Drudge Report, which is to the world of Web sites what having your book promoted on “Oprah” is to the world of publishing.

Another innovation was the Election Erection ’04 contest, which served as an opportunity for first-time voters—a bloc that was thought by pundits to hold the key to the nation’s future—to state their political preferences by decorating their bodies with the names of favored Presidential candidates. By Election Day, the site featured more than three hundred mostly female students, who showed a considerable range of inventiveness in their use of display type. Many opted for a message (“Kerry Me Away” or “Bush ’04”) written in lipstick or marker pen in more or less the place where a T-shirt logo would have been, had a T-shirt been worn. There was also, in a number of instances, the innovative use of official campaign stickers as pasties; and the witty pairing of a full Brazilian bikini wax with the slogan, inscribed just below the navel, “Say No To Bush.” The final tally of submissions, which had Kerry beating Bush nearly two-to-one, demonstrated that the moral values of at least some Republican voters do not exclude posing, “Girls Gone Wild” style, with “Bush” scrawled on one buttock and “Dick” on the other.

The responsibility for choosing which photographs will be featured falls to Ricky, who serves as the site’s editor. Josh handles business, Jakob deals with the technical side of things, and Zach takes care of design. The workload at CollegeHumor.com has grown so great that recently the four advertised on Craig’s List for an intern, a position for which they received more than a hundred applications, mostly from recent college graduates, although there was one from what Josh called a “forty-five-year-old guy” with a background in retail sales.

“Ricky doesn’t actually have to think it’s funny; he just has to know that college kids think it’s funny,” Josh explained. A key to college humor, the four have realized, is that students like to think they belong to a small in-crowd that understands the joke, while the public at large remains clueless. Take the phrase “More Cowbell,” which is a slogan appearing on one of the most popular of the company’s Busted Tees; it comes from an instruction given in a skit on “Saturday Night Live.” “Not everyone saw that episode, so the people who did see it think it is that much cooler because nobody else knows,” Josh said. Another familiar trope of contemporary college humor is a hand gesture known as the shocker, in which the ring finger of the hand is held down by the thumb while the remaining three fingers stay rigid. “No one over the age of twenty-five knows what it means, but I guarantee you that ninety per cent of college students know what it is,” Josh said. (The gesture indicates a method of pleasuring a female partner, though not one that looks to be easily undertaken without incurring hand cramps.) Ricky had the idea of manufacturing a large foam hand, the Big Shocker, like those on sale at sports events. So far, close to twenty thousand have been sold through CollegeHumor.com, for a profit of about ten dollars apiece. “We figured that other people would copy them, so we took a patent out on it,” Josh said. “So we have a U.S. government document that has a picture of the shocker on it. It’s kind of funny.”

Advertising is also a source of revenue, some of it from such companies as DreamWorks, some of it from sports-gambling sites, and some of it from other manufacturers of T-shirts and venders of novelties. The CollegeHumor team has been struggling with the question of whether it is worth sacrificing the raciness of the site’s content—which does not stray beyond the equivalent of being R-rated, but does not stop much short of it, either—in order to attract more prudish but more lucrative advertisers. “The Navy won’t want to have its ad on a page with a girl lifting her shirt on Mardi Gras,” Josh said. “But that’s why people are coming to our site, to see a girl lifting her shirt on Mardi Gras.”

Attracting female readers other than its exhibitionistic contributors to the site is another concern; right now, the readership is about seventy-five-per-cent male. There is one female columnist, Mindy Raf, who writes about “Sex, Relationships, and NYC Life” (examples: “Single and Braless: A Sunday Afternoon in New York City”; “Alcohol and Ovulation: Another Saturday Night at the Bar”). Other strategies are being considered, such as having a regular column devoted to “The O.C.,” the Fox show, which is a huge hit among girls in their twenties—so much so that the CollegeHumor boys have discovered that discussing the show’s plotlines is an excellent way of striking up a conversation with a girl.

Attracting females, not just to the site but to themselves, is also something of a preoccupation of the four pals. But dating in New York, they have discovered, is unlike dating in other places. “It is a more difficult scene to penetrate if you are not used to it,” Josh explained. “Going out and starting to talk to somebody and having them automatically not like you—it’s not like that in other places.” Another potential dating hazard identified, if not yet experienced, by the four is the possibility of attracting women whose real interest is in their purchasing power rather than their personalities. “I thought New York girls would be higher maintenance than what I have experienced, but I haven’t had to take anyone out to really nice restaurants or anything,” said Jakob, whose dates, toward the end of last year, included a visiting British student who was, he declared one night before going to meet her, perfect for him, her perfection including the fact that she was returning home at the end of the semester. The friends do go to nice restaurants; one of their new favorites is Landmarc, on West Broadway, which they think is a good place for steak frites, so long as you don’t mind being carded.

Students have been prone to bawdy humor since at least the Middle Ages—witness Chaucer’s “The Milleres Tale”—and the themes of American college humor have proved remarkably resilient over time. An editor of a book published in 1950 entitled “A Treasury of College Humor” remarked that “although the atomic bomb, and other timely trivia, may momentarily intrude, broad and universal themes—the fate of the football team, the perusal of sex, and the imbibing of alcoholic beverages—remain predominant.” (The Iraq war does crop up among CollegeHumor.com’s photo collection: one picture, entitled “2004 Shocker World Tour Hits Kirkuk,” shows three men and a woman in U.S. uniform on an airstrip giving the shocker.) College humor publications date back as far as 1830, with the publication, at Princeton, of the short-lived Chameleon and of The Thistle; by the late eighteen-hundreds the Yale Record, __the Princeton Tiger, and the Harvard Lampoon had all been established. Some of the pages of those publications would not provoke a smile among today’s undergraduates—those featuring punning poems requiring a knowledge of Greek verb declensions, for example—but there is much that differs only in degree from what is now considered hilarious. (The Emory Phoenix ran, in the last years of the nineteenth century, a guide to “The Art of Kissing,” which advises, among other things, “Don’t glue your face to hers and have a good time all to yourself while you’re flattening her nose all over one of her cheeks.”)

The nineteen-twenties are regarded as the golden age of college humor magazines, when writers such as James Thurber and Robert Benchley could be found making remarkably unfunny contributions to their pages. By that time, more than a hundred comic periodicals were being produced at colleges around the country, their contents aggregated periodically by a single magazine called College Humor, which sold as many as eight hundred thousand copies. By the late nineteen-thirties, the culture of college humor was sufficiently depraved to merit note in the Times, which quoted Irving H. Berg, the dean of New York University College of Arts, as saying, “What college students seem to think funny is pitifully lacking in real humor.” Berg also complained that “the so-called humorous publications emanating from various college and university campuses seem to deal exclusively with the subject of sex.” (Berg’s present-day successor at N.Y.U., Dean Matthew Santirocco, who admits to having been unfamiliar with CollegeHumor.com until it was recently brought to his attention, says of the site, “It is commercial and self-promotional, and it seems to me that what is essential about humor is that it is not commercial or self-promotional.”)

College humor suffered a decline in currency in the nineteen-sixties and the first half of the nineteen-seventies, when campus concerns such as civil rights and the draft proved impossible to translate into the magazines’ typical vernacular of antic japery. But there was a restoration in the late seventies and early eighties, aided by the National Lampoon, which was founded in 1969 by several graduates of the Harvard Lampoon and which had its greatest success with the release of the film “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” in 1978. The National Lampoon, in its heyday, is the media model to which the CollegeHumor boys aspire: a book, “The CollegeHumor Guide to College,” is in the works, and they have had informal talks with program-development people at VH1. A CollegeHumor Comedy Tour has just been launched, and the goal is to develop a stable of talent with which to produce TV shows or movies, though the four founders have yet to figure out how, exactly, to translate beer-and-breast-based amusement into forms more dependent on narrative. (Even “Porky’s” had a plot.)

A more direct descendant of the style of humor favored by the National Lampoon can be found in The Onion, a parody newspaper that was started by two undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1988. Josh, of CollegeHumor.com, is happy to point out that his site has surpassed The Onion in traffic, “though I can’t say we are better.” There is a crucial difference in content between The Onion and CollegeHumor.com: while the success of the former depends on the wit of its writers, the appeal of the latter is closer to that of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” CollegeHumor.com offers found humor of the sort pioneered by, among others, Steve Allen and David Letterman. Yet CollegeHumor.com isn’t the expression of a governing comic sensibility determined to entertain an audience with, say, Stupid Pet Tricks; rather, the audience decides what is funny, and entertains itself. CollegeHumor.com doesn’t just cater to the lowest common denominator; it’s cooked and served by the lowest common denominator, too.

On Thanksgiving weekend, Ricky and Josh attended their five-year high-school reunion, which took place in a bar in downtown Baltimore. The bar was decorated in the manner of an Upper East Side frat-boy hangout, with sporting equipment such as lacrosse sticks and rowing oars mounted on the walls, and large TV screens displaying a college basketball game. Ricky ordered a gin-and-tonic from the open bar, while Josh, anticipating future crowding, ordered two beers at once, holding a full one in his left hand while drinking from the one in his right. Neither was driving—they’d got a ride with a classmate who was studying at night for his M.B.A., working for a brokerage firm during the day, and living at home with his parents. All of Josh and Ricky’s old friends knew, of course, that the pair were living in New York and doing well, but no one paid it very much attention. Most classmates had stayed in the Baltimore area, including Ricky’s high-school girlfriend, who had just bought a house with her boyfriend, and a woman who had gone to the same college as Josh and was now working as an accountant. The class president, who had been very cool and had ridden a scooter, was now attending motorcycle-repair school in Arizona. One young woman, who was wearing a high-necked white sweater and black pants rather than the low-cut top and low-cut jeans favored by most of her classmates, was rumored to have become a nun, but that rumor was soon determined to be false, if diverting.

Someone had brought a shoebox full of photographs taken by the class archivist, and they were scattered across the bar, there for the taking by those who wanted a memento of their even younger, even fresher years. There were shots of costume parties, shots of jocks mugging for the camera, shots from the prom, where girls with wrist corsages slow-danced with gawky boys, and lots of shots of kids just hanging out in the cafeteria or the gymnasium, grinning at the photographer. They weren’t very different from the pictures that appear on Ricky and Josh’s Web site—amounting to a simple visual statement: We were here.

Ricky flicked through the pictures and slipped a couple into the inside breast pocket of his jacket, which he’d recently bought at H & M, going into the store and ordering a whole outfit directly off one of the mannequins. There was one of a girl whom he said Josh had always had a crush on; and there was one of himself holding up a big, cumbersome camera—the kind of camera people used before students started snapping themselves with tiny digital cameras or cell phones, and before photographs became things to e-mail or look at online. Josh picked up one or two pictures at random, and for a moment looked nostalgic—not so much for the content of the pictures as for the form. “I kind of miss these,” he said. ♦